tag: cloud computing

There has been a lot of grumbling lately about the IoT and how it has failed to live up to expectations. But the problem may be less about the success of the IoT than the ability of any group of chipmakers and manufacturers to capitalize on its success.
The IoT has been growing steadily since the term was first coined by Kevin Ashton, who began using RFID inside of Procter & Gamble to ma... » read more

Robert Blake, president and CEO of Achronix, sat down with Semiconductor Engineering to discuss what's changing in the embedded FPGA world, why new levels of customization are so important, and difficulty levels for implementing embedded programmability. What follows are excerpts of that discussion.
SE: There are numerous ways you can go about creating a chip these days, but many of the prot... » read more

The starting point for semiconductor designs is shifting. What used to be a fairly straightforward exercise of choosing a processor based on power or performance, followed by how much on-chip versus off-chip memory is required, has become much more complicated.
This is partly due to an emphasis on application-specific hardware and software solutions for markets that either never existed befo... » read more

Finance
Santa Monica, Calif.-based Sixgill reports raising $27.9 million in its Series B round of private financing, led by DRW Venture Capital. Mobile Financial Partners participated in the round. The startup last year raised $6 million in its Series A funding, also led by DRW. The company offers the Sixgill Sense sensor data services platform, addressing applications in the Internet of Thing... » read more

The number of chipmakers rushing to 10/7nm is rising, despite a slowdown in Moore's Law scaling and the increased difficulty and cost of developing chips at the most advanced nodes.
How long this trend continues remains to be seen. It's likely that 7/5nm will require new manufacturing equipment, tools, materials and transistor structures. Beyond that, there is no industry-accepted roadmap, m... » read more

By most accounts, Kevin Ashton of the Auto-ID Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology coined the term “the Internet of Things” in 1999, referring to a system of ubiquitous sensors connecting the Internet with the physical world.
We were well into the 21st century before the Internet of Things, as a marketing term or a short description of a certain technology, came to be wide... » read more

How far can you go on solar power? 493 million miles, at least if you're the Juno spacecraft. Plus, winemaking gets a boost from submarine technology, in this week's top tech picks from Ansys' Bill Vandermark.
Mentor's Steve Pateras digs into how automotive ICs bring a whole new set of requirements that are driving the evolution of memory BIST.
If you're interested in neural networks and ... » read more

There have been several points, in the history of manufacturing, when technology has truly revolutionized the way products are made. In the early part of the 20th century, the steam engine and electrification led to mass production, and in the 1970s, when robotics, computers, and other types of automation came on the scene, productivity got another big boost. Since then, though, technology has ... » read more

There was a time, not that long ago, when chip design and EDA tools consumed some of the largest data centers with tens of thousands of machines and single datasets that consumed more than a hard disk could hold. The existing IT capabilities of the times were stretched to their limits. But while design sizes grew, other aspects of the flow did not develop as fast.
“This has been driven by ... » read more